“We only began rationing here at the keep the past sennight or two. The master had enough stored. And I’m shamed ta say, we weren’t sharing with those down below until then.”
Until Cnut was gone, she meant.
“You haven’t seen the village folks yet. Sad it is, very sad!”
Okay, Andrea, why don’t you bring up another cheery subject? Like this icky flour. Oh well! On those survivor shows, they’re always talking about how much protein is in insects. “Is it all right if I use some of this flour that’s been de-bugged?” Andrea asked.
Girda nodded and watched as she placed her bowl just under the edge of the table and whisked some of the flour into it with her fingers. Still standing there, she braced her bowl on the table and whisked the egg mixture some more. It was still liquidy. So she repeated the flour process until she had the dough the right consistency . . . slightly wet. She placed a piece of linen over the bowl and set it aside. After wiping off her table and taking the dirty utensil over to the tray of items to be washed, she went back to Girda and said, “What can I do to help?”
“I’m thinking about roasting a side of boar fer t’night’s meal. So I’ll hafta move the porridge kettle ta the other crane on yer fire. Don’t wanna wait too long ta get the hog started. Boar can be tough as leather if it don’t cook a long time over a fire what’s not too hot. ’Course it would be better if we could bury it in hot coals and let it go fer a couple of days, but that works only in good weather. The embers would go out with all the cold and snow.”
“Are you sure that serving the pork as a meal is wise, considering the shortage?” Oh God, here I go again, offering my unsolicited opinion. What the hell! In for a penny, in for a pound. “What if the men don’t bring back sufficient game to last the winter, shouldn’t those few animals down in the cold cellar be used to infuse flavor into a larger dish, rather than be the main dish?”
“Huh?”
“I’m just saying that we have to find a way to spread the meat and poultry and fish among a large group of people over a long period of time so that everyone is satisfied. Or at least their stomachs are filled.”
“That’s what I’m trying ta do, girl . . . I mean, mistress. I kin slice boar real thin. Gotta give grown men at least a taste of something substantial, lest their body humours get all twisted. They can’t live on soup alone.”
They can if they have to, body humours or not. But she didn’t want to argue with Girda. “Whatever you say. Just make sure to save a little meat on the bones.”
“I use’ly give ’em ta the dogs.”
“Not anymore. Not until they’ve been through the soup pot at least once. Even rabbit bones or fish bones can serve a second purpose. For example, pork bones and sauerkraut would be good. Do you have sauerkraut here . . . I mean, at the present time?”
“No, but I kin make some up. We got cabbages enough. But gods help us, the farting in the hall after eating sauerkraut is bad as rotten eggs.”
Couldn’t be any worse than that Lucipire slime! Andrea thought. Which immediately made her think of her sister, and worry. Oh God, please let Celie be safe.
She thought she heard a voice in her head say, Have faith, my child. Could it be God, answering her prayer? No, it was probably just wishful thinking. In fact, that was what Cnut had told her, pretty much, “Trust me.” And he was no god. Though he looked like one. Not like the Lord, but one of the Norse gods. Yeah, Chris Hemsworth as Thor.
I am going over-the-cliff bonkers here. The sooner this food/famine crisis is taken care of here, the sooner I can return to the sanity of my own time. I hope. And Celie can escape the insanity of whatever she’s involved in. I hope. With that in mind, she suggested to Girda, “How about we make a menu for the week?” It was like pulling teeth to get Girda to think that far ahead, but they did it finally, pitiful as the fare was.
At the end of the day, Andrea had what she considered a brilliant idea. She was making her own sourdough starter. Since there was no yeast or baking powder in this time period, she needed something for leavening. Wood ash might do. Years ago, when she was in cooking school, she’d taken a class on bread making, and one of the things early pioneer women did was start their own dough mix, which they carried with them, even on the wagon trains, just adding to it every time they removed some batter. There were no glass jars here, but Andrea figured an earthenware container should work just as well.
Girda just shook her head when Andrea explained what she was going to do. “Flour what ferments like ale? Sounds like rot ta me.”
“You’ll see. It will make delicious bread. And other things, too.”
Despite the frigid cold outside, it soon became almost unbearably hot in the kitchen and Andrea removed her outer shirt, which led Dyna, who was mending a pair of her son’s pants, to ask what those letters meant on the back of her shirt. At first, Andrea didn’t understand, then she remembered. “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy,” she explained.
“What’s a cowboy?” Dyna wanted to know.
“A man who rides a horse and tends cattle.”
Dyna paused, pondering Andrea’s meaning, as did others in the room who were listening in. Bodil who was folding laundry. Helga who was churning butter. Dotta who was sweeping the dirt floor. Girda who was peeling turnips. Even the two boys who tended the fires, Tumi and Bjorn.
Dyna was the first to burst out with laughter, followed by giggles, and snickers, and outright guffaws from the others. Some of them gave Andrea a suspicious look at the same time they were enjoying the humor, perhaps wondering about the morals of a woman who was a walking invitation to sex.
But Girda got the humor. “Would that be like, Save a Longboat, Ride a Viking?”
“Exactly,” Andrea said.
A week passed with her doctoring her sourdough starter twice a day, like a baby. It kept her from dwelling incessantly on the fact that there was no sign of Cnut or the other men, except for the fishermen, Arnstein and Ingolf, who brought them strings of bony trout. Girda said she could do a better job with spit and a stick. So, they went off again. And again. If nothing else, they had bread and fishes, like the Bible. The Good Book hadn’t mentioned all those bones, though.
But no Cnut.
Was it an ominous sign that Cnut hadn’t returned?
What if he’d returned to the future without her?
He wouldn’t do that. Unless he was forced to, against his will.
And what about Celie? Ten days with no idea what was happening with her sister. Or even if she was alive.
Face it, she had to trust that Cnut would come back and help her.
He was her anchor in this time-travel madness. Without him, she would have to be strong if she was to survive this ordeal. Without him, she would have to sink or swim, on her own merits.
She decided to swim.
“Hey, Girda,” she called out, “Did I tell you I make a great seafood chowder?”
“Whass chowder?”
Andrea explained.
Girda groaned, “Son of a troll! Soup again!”
Chapter 12
They ran into everything except Eskimos . . .
Cnut was gone for ten days. He’d run into a few problems. Like a bear the size of a bus that they’d tracked for three days. Then they’d had to build a sledge to pull the thing back to the castle. A good problem, right?
Wrong.
While they’d been struggling in the midst of a sudden blizzard to put together the conveyance, which he and his five men would have to pull by hand since they’d traveled on foot, they’d run into two Lucipires who’d been tracking Igor’s lemon lure.
As far as Cnut knew, there had been no Lucipires in this territory when he’d lived in the Norselands before, but maybe they’d just never traveled this far below their arctic homeland, or one of them. But they were definitely here now. The question was how many, and how Cnut could let Michael or his brothers know of this presence.
For now, he had his frightened housecarls to deal
with. Try to explain ten-foot-tall mungs with red eyes, six-inch fangs, scales, claws, and a tail to five Viking warriors, who wouldn’t blink at the sight of a troop of Saxon soldiers, or a bear the size of a bus, but were petrified by these unexplainable beasts.
Even worse, one of the mungs got his teeth into lemon-scented Igor, which caused him to dissolve into nothing, from his bald head down to his stinksome toes, his clothes lying atop the snow. Forget Valhalla, this Viking sinner was now on a fast track to Lucipiredom.
Cnut was able to handle the two mungs with some expert swordwork and stabs through their evil hearts. Some skills you never unlearn. Thankfully, he still had his switchblade sword with him that had been treated with the symbolic blood of Christ. He could have killed them with a regular sword, but then they would have come back to “life” again as demon vampires. This way they were sent with tails between their legs, so to speak, to Hell for eternity. These two Lucies dissolved, as Igor had, but into pools of sulfurous slime.
But then Cnut turned and saw that his four remaining men were gawking at him like he was a monster.
With quick thinking, Cnut asked, “Have you ne’er seen a Lucibear before?”
“Huh?” Ulf the Archer, whose arrow had provided the final wound bringing down the real bear, stared at Cnut suspiciously. “What is a Lucky Bear?”
“Not a Lucky Bear, a Lucibear,” Cnut lied. “They come from the far north. Rarely do they roam this far south of their polar home. We will have to tell our skald Brian to write a saga about this adventure.”
Ulf and the others seemed satisfied with that explanation but Njal just stared at him. Njal was older than all of them and had no doubt gone a-Viking more than fifty times and traveled to more countries. He had lived too long without ever hearing of such creatures.
The five of them were left to drag the gutted thousand-pound bear on a poorly constructed, toboggan-like sled. It was like a not-so-funny reenactment of the Three Stooges, except they were the Five Stooges.
That’s when things got even worse. A pack of white wolves, attracted by the smell of bear blood, began to stalk them, then came rushing out of the woods. If they weren’t so deadly, they would be a beautiful sight. The snow wolves, or arctic wolves, were rare, and traveled as extended families. In this case, there were about ten of the snarling, teeth-bared creatures headed their way. The men dropped their ropes attached to the sledge and raised their weapons. Four of the animals escaped, but there were six good-size bodies lying on the ground soon after. At least a hundred pounds each and five feet long. Wherever they’d been feeding, there must not be a famine.
The men were all panting heavily, exhilarated by the challenge well-met, more than they’d been panting with the bear, even. If they had some mead, they’d raise a toast.
“We can’t take them with us,” Cnut declared then. “The sledge is too heavy already.”
“We bloody hell will,” Thorkel declared right back at him. “Holy Thor! These white furs are worth a fortune. I’ll carry them myself if I have to.”
“You ain’t keeping all these furs fer yerself,” Ogot the Blacksmith protested.
“Too bad we can’t eat the meat!” Ulf was poking one of the animals with his long sword, checking its sex. Apparently the male fur was more desirable.
“Wolf meat is too stringy fer my eating,” Njal said. “And gamey! Phew! The stink is enough ta gag a maggot!”
“Tell that to the villagers whose bellies are bloating with starvation,” Ogot remarked. His words were sympathetic but his tone was indifferent.
Thus it was, as a compromise, that they spent more time skinning the six wolves and building a fire to ward off any other predators that had an appetite for bear meat. They left the wolf meat behind, however, far from their campsite.
That night, around the fire, as they took turns at guard, their conversation turned to what else? Women.
“We need to invent a new sex spot,” Thorkel said.
“What’s wrong with the Viking S-spot?” Ulf wanted to know.
Thorkel shrugged. “The Viking S-spot is all well and good, but it is located in the women, and while men get much satisfaction from making their women scream when we touch them there, I think it is time for a male sex spot.”
“Some people say there is nothing new in sex. Anything we think of now must have been thought of before,” Cnut said.
“I don’t believe that,” Aslak said. “Once, whilst a-Viking, I met this man from the Arab lands who said his harem girls are taught to do the spiral. The man is on the bottom and the woman, straddling him, places his cock right at her opening. Then she starts rolling her hips in wide circles, starting big at the beginning and getting to smaller circles at the base of his cock. Then she does it over and over until the man peaks like a rutting pig.”
Nice picture, that, Cnut thought. Not the corkscrewing maneuver, but the pig sex.
“Hah! I don’t think I’d ever be able to talk my Ingrid into doing that,” Ogot said.
“My Helga would,” Ulf bragged.
No one said anything, the silent consensus being that who would want her to. To say that Helga was uncomely was an understatement.
“Did you ever make a woman fart during the bedsport?” Thorkel asked. “That is a sure sign the woman has lost control if she lets loose one of those.”
“Helga does all the time.”
Way more information than Cnut wanted, especially when Thorkel began to muse on Andrea’s talents in the sex arts. “I never saw the attraction in flat-chested women,” Thorkel commented.
“Yea, but Cnut’s woman has a fine arse. I noticed in those braies she wears.” This from Ulf. You’d think he had more than enough on his hands with two wives, one of them being the fearsome Helga, to be ogling a new woman.
“Is she a wanton, wearing such garments?” Njal asked.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! This had gone far enough. “Andrea is not my sex partner.”
“Does that mean she is on the market?” Thorkel was twirling the edge of his mustache.
“No, she is not on the market.”
“Do you speak for her?”
“I am her . . . uh, protector.” Cnut hoped Andrea didn’t hear that. He was pretty sure she wouldn’t like that designation. It sounded too much like a mistress situation.
“No need to protect her from me. I am good with women,” Thorkel proclaimed. “Methinks I will leave the question up to her to decide. Surely you cannot disagree with that, my jarl.”
“I thought you had your sights on Dyna,” Njal remarked.
“I did. I do, but she will not spread her thighs without the marriage vows. Even then, she demands fidelity.”
All the men, except Cnut, clucked their tongues at the unreasonable expectation.
“I for one need to get some sleep,” Cnut said with a wide yawn. “Tomorrow may prove to be even harder than today.”
And it was.
Can anyone say wild boar?
Next time Cnut went on a hunt he was not going to pray for God’s blessing on their mission. Or mayhap not so hard. A classic case of “Be careful what you pray for.”
There are breadwinners, and then there are bearwinners . . .
Andrea was tending her sourdough starter, which was coming along nicely, when she heard a loud commotion outside in the back courtyard, if the flattened dirt area could be called that, of the castle. While the wooden fortress sat atop a motte, or flat-topped hill, from the front, leading down to the farms and villages, the back of it ran into the steep, heavily wooded mountain that began about a half mile from any of the outbuildings.
Everyone went outside to see what was going on. It was from that forest that the loud whoops and hollering could be heard.
Fortunately, it was that brief period of day where there was some light. So they could see clearly.
Cnut and some men were dragging a wooden contraption on which there was a huge mound. All of the men wore white skins of some kind—wolves, maybe—with the animal h
eads atop their own heads and the skins draping their shoulders. Two men carried a long pole from which hung a wild pig by its hindquarters.
Food. That’s what Andrea and the others concluded with smiles and cheers of welcome.
It was too cold to remain outside without a coat or outer garment; so Andrea and some of the others returned to the kitchen. Although it was midday and the next meal wouldn’t be served until this evening, the men would be cold and hungry. Without being directed to do so, Andrea moved the hearth crane so that last night’s soup would reheat. It was made with the hated trout bones, as well as some cod and various other varieties of fish. Heads, tails, skin, and all had been cooked, then strained for bones, and the good meat picked out. Andrea had to be careful not to get the soup too hot or it would scorch. She still wasn’t proficient in cooking over an open fire.
Girda was pulling out circles of manchet bread that had been baked that morning, a slab of butter, some applesauce, and a huge bowl of mashed turnips. Andrea broke stale bread into small pieces to be used like crackers.
Girda glanced over at Andrea, and they smiled at each other. Comrades in Food who’d proven two cooks could survive in one kitchen.
Cnut was the first to come bursting into the kitchen. “We got a bear,” he announced with a huge smile. He usually didn’t smile so broadly because of his pointy teeth. He shouldn’t worry. He had a beautiful smile.
He was looking at Andrea when he made the announcement.
And she smiled back at him. “And some wolves, too,” she said, looking pointedly at the animal on his head. “Is it some kind of hunting ritual?”
He put a hand to his head with surprise, having forgotten he was still wearing the carcass. “No,” he said with a laugh. “We couldn’t put any more weight on the bear sledge without it breaking, so we skinned the wolves and . . .” He let his words trail as he pulled the wolf off and threw it on a nearby bench.
She saw then that his face was bristly with whiskers, as well as the shaved sides of his head. The braid that ran down the center of his head was half undone. But his blue eyes danced with joy, and she felt her heart leap and her skin tingle. Even from across the room, she smelled peppermint. How was that possible when he was covered with a long, heavy, wool cloak and layers of other clothing? In addition, with all the blood and gore the men had undoubtedly been handling, and lack of bathing or washing clothes, the men reeked. Thank God for peppermint!